The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter

ISBN: 0099588110

Cater's prose in this selection is dark and heady like a large glass of red wine. Dense with sensuous imagery, this is a rich collection of stories that we want to go on and on. These are clever updates of classic fairy tales, which Carter, arguably, puts a feminist spin on.

Wrought with suspense, sometimes gore, and often terror, these stories are to be revelled in, they are so drenched in life. Though at first we wonder at the horror and sexuality that she adds to these tales, I think they highlight to us just how complex the stories of Grimm and Perrault truly are.

Perhaps, though, the 'women coming out on top' is a bit overdone. Moreover, for a collection of stories that are supposed to be new, Carter sticks surprisingly rigidly to Gothic convention.

Rating: 8/10

The Princess Bride - William Goldman

ISBN: 9780747545187

Goldman intelligently entwines meta fiction into this seemingly traditional adventure story. The narrative hops from romance to danger to camaraderie to sword fights to explorations to palaces with no more difficulty or jarring than a dragonfly flitting in and out of a pond. Whilst juggling with this in one hand, Goldman balances a critique of the genre in the other.

However, I found the constant interruption of the author's voice irritating because of its frequency, and I felt that he was being disparaging to similar tales. Perhaps I was longing for a traditional adventure, but I felt that there was too much jumping up and down of the author so that the characters became just that--characters.

It was all too clear that this what was happening was only a story. Other instances where this is far more successful is the subtlety of Edgeworth's Belinda, and the jumping-in-with-both-feet approach of Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. I suppose I wanted Goldman to either tone it down or crank it up.

Nevertheless, I did enjoy the story and one cannot deny that it is well written, with originality of expression in a traditional genre that could easily become jaded. I would have been happier if the book had finished off without the additional 'Buttercup's Baby' section, which I felt dampened the rest.

Rating: 6/10

Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman

ISBN: 9780755322800

I think of this book as a grimy fairytale and the panorama of the story seems to be in sepia. This novel is about the "other London", a fantasy world of heroes and villains, in unusual and often grotesque packages. Brimming with small details that make you laugh out loud or cringe in disgust, Gaiman brings us the equivalent of 'those little extras' that make our journey through this novel so enchanting.

Richard Mayhew, our protagonist is so very authentic that we forget that this isn't something we encounter everyday. We do not so much suspend our disbelief as throw it out of the window and dance in its wake. It takes quite a writer to take a world lousy with rats and make it beautiful.

Despite their unusual shells, the characters display vividly human emotions so that we connect with them instantly and feel that we should be inviting them to tea with our favourite aunt. Door, especially, sparkles with vivacity in the way only Gaiman can achieve. However, I was a little disappointing with the ending, which I felt was an anticlimax.

Rating: 8/10